Subtitles for free to air TV in Australia

[adventurer]

Hello.
I'm very new to Nextpvr, having stayed with WMC for the past few years.
As a background I'm located in Melbourne, Australia.

I have just installed Nextpvr into a Windows server 2008 virtual machine. Tuner is Hdhomerun.
On a Windows 7 machine I have Kodi client.
Everything works except subtitles (or maybe it's known as closed captions)

On the Kodi client, I can't get subtitles to display on live or recorded TV.
On the web client (serverIP:8866), clicking on closed caption on live or recorded TV also does nothing.
Another test is copy out the .ts recording file and use VLC to play, turn on subtitles. This test does show subtitles, but the subtitles look very blocky huge font size.

I'm wondering is this a problem on Nextpvr or Kodi ? And is this fixable ?

Regards.

[sub]

You'd be able to view these subtitles if you're viewing in NextPVR itself (NextPVR.exe).

I know there are some scenarios where you can't view the subtitles in the web app. The modern web app is still new, and some of this still needs work.

I'm not sure whether Kodi is compatible with Australian subtitles or not. NextPVR is passing Kodi all the streams for the channel though, including subtitles etc, so if Kodi isn't showing them, it'd be a Kodi bug or shortcoming (and the same regardless of what PVR backend you use).

[adventurer]

I can't get Nextpvr.exe to run properly on the VM Windows server 2008. It will hang and I have to kill the task.

Ok looks like to verify this I'll have to rebuild the VM with Windows 7 to do further test. I'll write back when I get some result.

[sub]

To be honest, VMs are a bit crap when it comes to this type of thing, since a lot of CPU is used processing video etc, and it quickly becomes evident that a VM CPU is a lot slower than a real CPU. That said, if you want to post the logs when it hangs though, we'll see what was happening at the time. It might be related to your choice of decoders etc.

[adventurer]

Ok some good news and bad news.
Nextpvr.exe when running on the VM itself will display subtitles.
So this is a problem with Kodi.

There's no need troubleshoot Nextpvr.exe hanging in a Windows server 2008 VM. It was not my intention to use it this way, only for testing.

My intention is run a Windows 2008 VM with Nextpvr as the back end in the garage, the front end Win7 PC can have Kodi, Openelec for TV.

Actually the result is proving quite successful, the VM CPU load on the back end server is quite low. Front end Kodi playback live or recorded is smooth, no lag.
But this Kodi subtitles bug is a show stopper. Kodi is suppose to be perfect for my use case but it turns out to be a pile of crap.

Now I have to consider replacing with front end software.
Plex is certainly a overkill and waste of time. Even Emby is too complicated in my opinion, as I just want TV, not anything else.

[sub]

You can always run NextPVR as a front client, or nlite.

[adventurer]

I wish there's a simple solution, but, no offence, neither Nextpvr.exe nor nlite will pass the wife test.

[Graham]

Plex is certainly a overkill and waste of time. Even Emby is too complicated in my opinion, as I just want TV, not anything else.

I wish there's a simple solution, but, no offence, neither Nextpvr.exe nor nlite will pass the wife test.

What does the "wife test" include?

At NextPVR --> Settings --> Plugins ... you can switch off, for example, the built in Video and Pictures (and other) plugins and you could make NextPVR "TV only" ... http://nextpvr.com/nwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Co...on.Plugins

[adventurer]

It's all about the presentation layer. WMC has set the bar rather high.

[mvallevand]

It's all about the presentation layer. WMC has set the bar rather high.

That is subjective, I personally always hated the WMC UI. I think most screens in NextPVR aren well desinged for ease of use, but Ipersonally don't like the look and feel of the more recent metadata screens so use the old style but that good be resistance to change which you are probably feeling too.

Martin